A great variety of different products are available for roofing materials, such as the traditional tar shingle, slate, tile, simulated wood products, and metal sheeting. Some of these products, such as typical tar shingles, have advantages over the other types of roofing material because they are less expensive and perform relatively well. Other types of roofing material, such as simulated wood roofing, slate, and tile, are more expensive, allow a different look to be applied to the roof of a house, yet sometimes suffer from poor performance since there are many seams and interconnection sites that must be weather-tight and are difficult to maintain. There has been an increased interest in metal roofing products which provide durable and weather-tight performance, in addition to having desirable appearance characteristics, in comparison to existing non-metal roofing products.
Metal roofing products have been available for quite some time, and provide a relatively reasonably priced roofing material with desired performance characteristics (resistance to hail damage, adequately weather-tight, and having a long life). Typically, the metal roofing products are available in long sheets either running continuously from the peak to the eaves of a roof, or running horizontally for several feet. These long sheets are sometimes formed to appear as if they are actually individual shingles, when in fact they are one piece of formed metal. One of the reasons elongated sheets have been popular is to reduce the number of seams and improve the weather-tight nature of the metal roofing material, and to make it more convenient to build and transport.
One significant drawback, however, is the fact that these long sheets of metal roofing material are difficult to ship without damage, and are expensive to form, especially if they have intricate artificial individual shingle folds formed therein.
One desirable aspect of tile and slate roofing, irrespective of high cost and maintenance, is that the different colors or hues of the material can be composed on a roof to create a very appealing appearance, which is the result of a process called blending. Blending is the intentional placement of individual or groups of shingles having different colors or hues next to each other to create the desired aesthetic effect--such as a weather-worn roof, a moss-laden roof, or simply a variety of different colors.
While the existing metal roofing has fewer seams to improve the weather-tight performance of the roofing material, the size of the sheets, which dictate the number of seams, are too large to allow effective blending of the roofing material. The large sheets of differing hues or colors placed next to each other do not create an appealing aesthetic appearance, and instead appear blocky or disjointed. The slate, tile and shake roofing materials that allow blending are much smaller in size and thus provide a more gradual transition between different hues and colors placed adjacent to one another. The slate and shake type roofing material that is formed of smaller individual units, however, have more seals to make weather-tight, and thus are less desirable. In some instances, an interleafing felt must be positioned underneath this roofing material to attempt to improve its weather-tight quality.
It is with the above issues in mind that the inventive metal single of the present invention was conceived and developed.